Organization, Shmorganization

So, the bad thing about being the last to post is that I feel like I don't have much left to add. The good thing is that I get to read everyone else's fabulous posts, and there's a good chance no one will read mine. (Come on, you know you never scroll down past Dr. Rogers' latest post).

This week's discussion (and the suggestions and ideas that accompanied it) was good for me, like one of those huge horse-pill-sized multivitamins you know you should really take, but somehow you always conveniently knock it off the bathroom counter into the toilet instead. I am not a naturally organized person--I have to work really hard at it (you should see my laundry room--my greatest fear is that I will die and no one will know which clothes are clean, which are dirty, and which ones need to go to the D.I.). So when it came to writing papers, I used to just toss organization out the window, sit down in front of the blinking cursor, and hope everything sorted itself out. I'm an overly recursive writer (this is not a good thing). I write a sentence, reread it, delete it, write another, delete half of it, delete all of it, write another, delete it...and so on, until 4:30 a.m. when I'm too tired to delete anymore and I just spit it out.

Luckily, since starting work on my master's degree, the length of paper and the amount of research that often goes into it (and the demands of my three insane children) make it nearly impossible to work this way. So I often resort to the "spread everything out on the living room floor" technique that Cheyney mentioned (this is a little more difficult--and awkward--when I'm working at Lampros Hall). I've also tried writing main points and quotes from my sources on notecards and organizing that way. The problem is that I often change my mind as I write, realizing that some ideas need to come sooner than others, and some don't fit in my paper at all; as a result, since my brain is about as organized as the back of my fridge (which, at this moment, happens to be full of what my two-year-old calls "Moldy Monsters"), I lose my place and spend several hours shuffling cards and rereading to figure it all out again.

The trouble with teaching organization, even if you've got a pretty good handle on it yourself, is that "flow" is fairly intuitive. As a writer, you develop a sort of sixth sense about it (instead of "I see dead people..." it's "I see transitions..."), so that you have a feel for where the next breadcrumb needs to drop, as well as what kind of breadcrumb it needs to be (whole wheat, rye, or pumpernickle). Sometimes it seems like teaching a less-organizationally-intuitive person to organize a paper is as hopeless as, say, teaching a tone-deaf person to sing a Sondheim score.

But I agree that laying it all out visually can be helpful--I like the sticky note idea, and I've also heard of writers "storyboarding" the way animators do, tacking sections of writing along a wall to have a visual and physical representation of their paper's organization. I've also used different colored markers or crayons to show which ideas, quotes, and sources go together (crayons are usually pretty handy at my house). But, as an organizationally-challenged individual, I'm always looking for new ideas.

So if any of you Super-Organizers out there (I think Adrian must be, like, the Charles Xavier of organization) come up with the ultimate solution, let me know. Then maybe you can come clean out my fridge.

This is a timely question, because I had just such a writer come to me in the writing center Wednesday afternoon. The assignment, for a 3080 class, was to write a five page response paper to a short story of the writer's choosing demonstrating a working knowledge of one of the endorsed approaches. The writer chose to deconstruct "The Most Dangerous Game." I'm sure most of us are familiar with Richard Connell's story. I had to tell the writer that I thought her thesis statement appeared at the bottom of page four of her five page paper. The preceding almost-four pages were a warm-up session, and she finally articulated what she wanted to write about with about three paragraphs to go. She agreed with me and asked if that meant the first four pages of her paper would have to be scrapped. I told her I didn't think that was the case, that with a little tweaking the "warm up" material could be put to good use supporting her thesis, now that she could consciously write towards it. But, I told her, she would need to do some reorganization. Out came the sticky notes (the big ones, not the little ones). I gave her a checklist of five sentences that amounted to her thesis statement broken down into an Aristotelian "A is A" form. On a second piece of paper I wrote: (1) Thesis. I told her that her task was to argue that this statement was true. I told her that since we'd broken her thesis down into five statements, she could argue that each statement was true, and that would constitute defending her thesis. I asked her to look at the first statement and find something in her paper that represented it. Under "thesis" on my sheet of paper I wrote this first statement. Under it I wrote "Bread crum" and next to it, a marker for the corresponding passage from her paper. Under that, I wrote "proof" and a marker for the corresponding textual evidence as she had already cited it in her paper. We worked through all five points of the thesis this way. A few of the points had not been already addressed in her paper, and a few things that had been in her paper had to be scrapped because they had nothing to do with her new thesis. I think the important things she took away from our session were that if a thing seems at first overwhelming, its a good idea to simplify it by breaking it down into a handful of manageable things. I modeled a "can-do" attitude for her, and gave her an effective method for organizing a paper around a thesis. She also understood the difference between textual evidence and authorial interpretation, which I think she was a little ambiguous about when she came in. The "can-do" attitude, I think, was the most important thing that came from the session. She wasn't as daunted by the task of rewriting her paper because when she left she had a working outline of her paper's organization. She had done all the work of this outline herself. The only thing I did was write down what she said and put bullet points next to the items so that instead of seeming like a big convoluted question, it was a handful of straightforward questions.

ORGANIZATION = The FLOW Chart and AAAAAb

Organization can be so tricky…

It seems like almost every student that walks into the WC asks for help with “flow.” It’s becoming one of my favorite words. Sometimes the paper is choppy (or flow-less) because it lacks transitions; at other times ideas need to be reordered, or are missing entirely. Figuring out what the student means by “flow” is the real trick. It’s like a puzzle, really.

I usually save the discussion on organization for the end of the session. Because I’m a visual learner, I like to impose that on the students as well. We work together to decide what each paragraph is about—writing a one word explanation out in the margins. Then I’ll usually write out a flow chart of some sort on another piece of paper. It’s helpful to ask the student what each paragraph has to do with the next and previous paragraphs. Reorder them as needed, add in the transitions or connections that the student has offered, cut out what doesn’t relate whatsoever. I think this helps to give them an idea of how to order the next paper they have to write.

I love Dr. Rogers’ post-it note idea, especially because the papers are small, sticky, and fit on the desk. I’ve used a version of this idea with my own writing—using note cards rather than post-its. It has been very helpful, if not space consuming. Note cards for bigger papers won’t fit on a desk, and so I’ve gotten into the habit of spreading them out on the living room floor. (Like floor tiles…with me, crying, in the center.) Sometimes when a paper is just not working, it’s helpful to write out the outline to see if there are gaps or jumps. Perhaps this is why I adopted this method for tutoring.

Knowing where the different bits of a paper should go is difficult because there are so many options, and so many types of papers. We’ve talked in class about the A/B/A/B or A/A/B/B methods, but what’s wrong with ABBA? (Whoo! Dancing Queen! Rock that catbox!) Just because a student’s paper is not organized in the way I would have done it probably doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. For example, on Tuesday I tutored a student who brought in a geography paper. After reading the first seven pages, which consisted of LDS church history, I stopped to ask him what this history had to do with geography and the title of his paper. He winked at me. “Just hold on,” he said. “You’re going to find out.” Sure enough, the last five pages summed it up nicely. Not the way I would have organized it, sure—but effective nonetheless.

Writing a Spider Web

When it really comes down to it, it is extremely difficult to explain the typical American organization concept for an essay to a person who doesn’t seem to understand it. Trying to organize a paper can even be difficult for experienced writers in their own works, and when it comes to explaining it to a student whose paper has to be original and devised out of the tutee’s mind without taints of the tutor’s opinion, the task becomes extremely frustrating. I have had an experience with this when a student came in who needed help organizing his ideas on his topic. His assignment was to write an argumentative essay on the causes of the current financial situation. It was obvious at first that his essay contained no thesis, but as I continued through his paper, I realized that his essay was organized in a very odd, but innovative fashion. Instead of beginning each paragraph with reiterating the thesis and how the current point supports it, he would smoothly transition the previous paragraph’s topic into the next, like a sort of “trail of bread crumbs”, that led to his most important argument at the end of his work. It read wonderfully and made perfect sense once the conclusion was reached, but overall was unacceptable because the reader had no idea what the paper was really about until the end. It was difficult for me to reveal to him how that, although his paper was organized in a certain fashion that seemed correct to him, it was not done in the right way for an academic paper.
The main concept that I try to make students realize who have problems with organization is that the reader has to know exactly what each part of the essay is and how it connects to the overall big picture. What I mean by this is that, especially for a paper that will be read by an instructor, the first paragraph has to make clear what the pervasive theme of the work will be; the thesis has to be stated clearly so that it screams “I Am the Thesis” without actually saying it. Everything else in the essay then stems from the thesis itself. The next step is to tie each remaining point back to the thesis by blatantly declaring how it is supporting the main idea. There can be no ambiguity and the reader must be taken down a path that in normal conversation would be considered overly obvious. This will automatically make everything in the essay relevant to the big picture. Because everything has to somehow relate back to the main idea, everything that doesn’t either has to be modified or taken out completely. The most difficult part about teaching organization to a student, then, is getting the student to organize their own essay without imposing on them a preconceived notion from the tutor. The student needs to understand that the work is their own and their ideas of importance and “order” will not be the same as the tutor’s. Therefore, organization is a subjective term that relies on the individual’s beliefs of what is most relevant and what material should be used to support the main idea. The fact that sometimes the “thesis” isn’t always obvious is difficult as well, since the student and the tutor will have to comb back through the essay and define a notion that seems to have connections to everything else. Writing an academic essay is like a spider web, which contains ideas that spiral out, but always find their way back to the collective center eventually.

Flow

How do we organize our papers? Let me count the ways. Since Dr. Rogers has admitted that he has spent years talking about this topic with colleagues and has yet to come to a satisfactory way of teaching organization to students I am not sure what I could say that would contribute to the conversation. When students come to me and ask me if it “flows” okay I walk through their paper looking for connecting sentences and connecting ideas. If for some reason something seems to be off a little bit I suggest some re-working, but I have not yet tried to actually teach the concept of organization.

With that being said, maybe we should all read a little Foucault to understand how we order things. We could just give our students that text and then they would understand the purpose and structure of organization. Maybe.

In order to understand how to organize something I decided to think about how I organize my papers. Usually I come up with an idea, think about it for awhile, read some criticism so see what others have said about the topic, and then I start thinking about what ideas go together. Before I became a graduate student I didn’t really think about organization, but when my papers started to get longer and I needed to work in a lot of outside criticism I began thinking about how to organize my papers to get the length I needed and to say what I thought was important. I got some great advice a bout how to organize my ideas. A professor told me that I should read an outside critic and then take note cards and write down what was important about that critic. I could include the reference, the quotes I wanted to use from the critic and the major points. When I had read everything that I wanted to read for the paper I would then look at all of my cards and organize them into the order I thought would be best for my paper. In a way this is kind of like the sticky note idea that Dr. Rogers brought up in class. It’s a visual representation of what a paper should look like for the student. Once I had my note cards organized I knew what I wanted to say. I could just sit down and write.

In our case the student usually has a paper and we just need to show them how to take their paragraphs and move them around to formulate something that actually makes sense. That’s what’s great about technology; the computer is an easy way to show how to revise and re-think ideas. You can use sticky notes to show the student a visual representation of his/her paper and then the student can use the computer to physically move the words around to make sense.

Maybe someday we can come up with a better way to talk about “flow.”

Why must the thesis go at the end of the first paragraph?!

As Emily pointed out, every student and every paper is different. I've worked with a few papers that had appalling organization. Those papers where when you think you're finally starting to get where it's going, you read another sentence and are left blinking like the fake (whose name I don't know) Katie Couric listening to Tina Fey answer questions... There have been times where I have just had to ask an open question "what were you trying to convey with this essay?" and hope the student has a better idea in his head than he does on his paper.

And, just because I can, I'm not going to transition into my next idea. How an essay is organized becomes more fluid as a student figures out how to organize an essay. If they don't understand the concept of a thesis, then as a tutor you should explain that, and probably teach them that the best place for it is at the end of the first paragraph. Getting the main idea up front can do wonders for a confusing paper, but then as a tutor, there are other things that I can do to help a student organize their paper. I like the post it notes idea, simply because it demonstrates the fluidity of the paper. Even our class example could have been organized differently for a different effect. So long as there is a logical order that can be signposted and connections made from one idea to the next, there are almost always options in organization. A lot of teaching organization is just teaching the writer to understand that they need to make clear what they were thinking when they jumped from one idea to the next. I've found that they normally think it is obvious, and when I point out that it is not and ask them to explain how they got from one idea to the next, they normally can do it. A paper often seems more organized even just by baby-stepping from one idea to the next in a paper, even perhaps, when there is clearly a better order that I, as a tutor and more experienced writer might prefer. I don't think you should reorder your student's papers to fit your idea of a good organization. I can, however, teach how to get from one idea to the next and point out that this is not obvious to most readers, and most importantly, it is fluid. In some of the best papers, the thesis is not at the end of the first paragraph. Sometimes, it just does not need to be, no matter what some of my professors have said. Sometimes, the effect created by creative organization is better than what might have happened from a more traditional flow. It all depends on the purpose of the paper. As a tutor, I feel like my job in teaching organization is just to show that they should be aware of what is happening, and make clear why they are putting things in the order they are. If the organization is bad enough, the writer normally notices that themselves as they try to explain that to me, and other times I decide it's not as a bad as I once thought, provided they do some subtle transitioning in their essay.

I'd rather talk about organization than comma splices any day.

Organizing Tricks

I do not have any great tricks for organizing a paper. That is why I paid extra special attention in class today so I could write down all of Dr. Rogers's suggestions. I think the post-it note method sounds the most promising. I know it always helps me if I can visualize the way things will lay once I rearrange them. The post-it notes accomplish this, and allow the student to move things easily without feeling as if they are destroying their entire paper.

Another method I have found helpful in my own writing is to read back through the first sentence of every paragraph. I check to see that these topic sentences are really topic sentences and to see if they are in the right order. When I discover that I have placed a paragraph about the main character, already discussed in the first few pages, at the end, then I know I need to move that paragraph to be with the parts of the paper that are most like it.

With one student, I found that he did not get to his main idea until the final paragraph. He spent time talking about the traits of a dog, (no, I'm not copying the class example), then got to the idea that he was attacked by a dog but learned to overcome his fear in the last paragraph. It was then I realized that he thought he paper was about this personal experience and how he overcame his fear, when in reality, I, as a naive reader, assumed he was telling me how great dogs are for no particular reason. I pointed out what I thought his main idea was after we finished, and he agreed. He wanted to tell about his experience overcoming his fear of dogs. So, I suggested that he move the last part to the beginning. This seemed to work.

Every student is going to be different. In each situation, we just have to try out several methods until we find what works. I am glad that I have some new suggestions for going about organization from today's reading and class. I sure need them!

Often organizational problems make understanding the writer's meaning impossible. If I can not understand what a tutee is trying to say I ask him or her, "What are you trying to say?" After they attempt to read me the line we just read on their paper I ask them again, "What are you trying to say here? I don't understand." I am not so great at waiting forever in silence for them to respond. After a sufficiently long and awkward silence I usually suggest something and ask if that is what they mean. They will then either respond with a "yes" or a "no" and possibly begin to explain. Asking them what they mean helps them to think about what it is that they are really trying to say. It also gives the writer an opportunity to reword what they've written in more comprehensible way.


Honestly I don't have any special tricks to help with organization. This probably spawns from a lack of experience and general knowledge about tutoring. The post-its sound like they could be an effective tool in helping students organize their thoughts. Post-its seem like they do a lot with a little. First, they can help with organization because the writer has to figure out what they are saying in just a few words in each paragraph, and then they become even more useful because of their mobility. I think by putting down the ideas of what you as a writer may be saying in a paragraph allows you to detach yourself from your writing and allows you to be more open to suggestion. It is way less scary to move a post-it around, than it is to move a whole paragraph.


I spoke with Kelley about different tools she uses to help students with organization. She likes to use collored pencils to represent ideas in different paragraphs. Using that trick, you can organize by color. Once again, attaching the paper to colors may help the writer to dettach themselves from the writing. Then it isn't them moving around their perfect ideas, its them just moving around some different colors.

Organizing Our Organization

I should admit here that I'm tempted to ask you what you mean when you say that an essay doesn't "flow."  But I'm not going to do that.

Instead, I'm going to ask you this:  when you are working with a student who has problems with organization, how do you do that?  How do you know where the different bits of the essay go?  How do you explain it to the student?  Do you have any tricks that you show students?  Outlines?  Post-its?

Rock the Casbah

Here I am, trying to sneak in a quick post before Dr. Rogers posts a new prompt ... On your mark, get set ...

I don't remember actually being taught to write essays. I remember in high school reading a bunch of poems and short stories and having to answer standard questions from the textbook like "Explain why so much depends on the red wheelbarrow" (when I'm actually wondering why the wheelbarrow got left in the rain in the first place, and who the heck let the poor little white chickens out?). But essays? I must have missed the class where they explained the whole five paragraph thing.

So I spent my first few semesters as a freshman English major filling my three to five page papers with what I thought was the right content, hoping no one would call my bluff. I kept getting "A"s, but all the while I was suffering from Dr. Roger's so-called impostor syndrome (except I always kind of thought of it as the Emperor's New Clothes syndrome -- you know, when you're parading around, thinking you're writing some pretty nice stuff and pretty soon someone points at you and yells, "She's only wearing her underwear!") I was sure I was going to come up against a professor who would expose me for the idiot I was, kind of like when I was five and my brother discovered that I thought Ronald Reagan and Robert Redford were the same guy, or when I was twenty-five and my husband caught me singing "Rock the Catbox! Rock the Catbox!" along with that song by The Clash. (Apparently, it's "Rock the Casbah.") (And, btw, Robert Redford is an actor. Ronald Reagan was an actor and a president. Who knew?)

I think the turning point came when I learned about this funny little thing called "Literary Criticism" in a fascinating class taught by Dr. Shigley. I learned about different ways to look at literature and different ways to write about it. Most importantly, I read a lot of essays. I realized, "Ahhhh...so this is what I should have been writing for the last two years." Writing papers was still a struggle, and I still was (am) terrified of being exposed for an idiot (Just so you know, Georgia is a state and a country. Huh.) But I guess I got the basics down.

I suppose the moral of this story is, don't spend two years of your college education trying to invent the university when it's already been invented for you. You just have to know the right place to look (ask Dr. Shigley--she'll hook you up). And remember kids: If you want to write good essays, read good essays. If you want to write about sparkling vampires, read Meyer.

And in the meantime, rock the catbox.